S.R.L. Clark is a prominent defender of environmental holism and an advocate of the better treatment of other species. Not coincidentally, he is also a defender of a Neoplatonic Theism which holds that the presuppositions of reason have theistic implications and the point of the world is to exemplify beauty, or all the forms of beauty. Here I examine certain aspects of his view. I do so because I’m drawn to his main holist conclusion: we should live according to those (...) rules that will allow as many creatures as possible, of as many kinds, their best chance of living a satisfactory life according to their kind. However, I express doubts about his general route to the principle. (shrink)

Balancing Change and Tradition in Global Education Reform is an invaluable resource for policymakers, faculty, students, and anyone interested in how decisions made about the education system ultimately affect the quality of education, educational access, and social justice.

S.R.L. Clark is a prominent defender of environmental holism and an advocate of the better treatment of other species. Not coincidentally, he is also a defender of a Neoplatonic Theism which holds that the presuppositions of reason have theistic implications and the point of the world is to exemplify beauty, or all the forms of beauty. Here I examine certain aspects of his view. I do so because I’m drawn to his main holist conclusion: we should live according to those (...) rules that will allow as many creatures as possible, of as many kinds, their best chance of living a satisfactory life according to their kind. However, I express doubts about his general route to the principle. (shrink)

Feminist engagement with liturgy has produced an abundance of new texts. This essay seeks to complement the production of feminist texts for prayer by considering ways in which feminist liturgy might more intentionally reflect on practices which mediate feminist liturgical principles— and especially the congruence of non-verbal aspects of liturgy with texts for and about feminist liturgy. The essay juxtaposes literature in feminist liturgy with literature in wider circles of liturgical theology. It draws a number of clues from the work (...) of Nicola Slee and also considers contributions from Rosemary Radford Ruether, Letty Russell and Siobhan Garrigan. (shrink)

Presidential leadership: navigating climate and challenges -- The hunt for dollars: appealing to constituents and critics -- Presidential engagements and entanglements: the university tackles the wider world -- Inheriting the wind: institutional stories and the shoulders of predecessors -- The contest for the middle: can the center hold? -- The dilemmas of diversity -- Political rightness and ideology: the battleground in and around the academy's walls -- The courage to hold the center: balancing convictions and passionate intensity -- Presidential imprints: (...) securing the academic core from threats within and without -- Life in the bully pulpit: choices and dilemmas -- The present and the future: presidential prospects -- The presidential post: inside the job -- The future presidency: guardian of the soul of the university. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that with regard to the President, the Emoluments Clause is not law. I argue for this on the basis of two premises. First, if something is a law, then it has a legal remedy. Second, EC does not have a legal remedy. This premise rests on one or more of the following assumptions: EC does not apply to the President; if EC were to apply to the President, it does not provide a (...) remedy; or, if EC were to apply to the President and have a remedy, it is not law because it is vague. The conclusion that EC does not apply to the President has a practical upshot. As a practical matter, President Trump’s worldwide business tentacles and his refusal to put his business assets into a blind trust does not violate EC and, arguably, does not violate federal conflict-of-interest law. (shrink)

Is the college presidency merely a position in which one manages bureaucracies, garners wealth, and mediates ideological battles?

SCSS President Stephen M. Krason wrote this letter in response to a review about a book he edited and contributed to in the SCSS’s Catholic Social Thought Book Series, The Crisis of Religious Liberty: Reflections from Law, History, and Catholic Social Thought. The review, which appeared in The Journal of Church and State, was mostly favorable to the book but made erroneous assertions and a false and unmerited conclusion about the sources Krason used in his Afterword in the (...) book. Krason also sent the letter to the editor of the Journal, but they apparently don’t run letters and did not make an exception with this one. Krason also sent a copy of this letter to the other contributors to the book and includes it here out of a sense of the need to have a public record of a response to a published book review that, of course, was publicly disseminated. (shrink)

This was one of SCSS President Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appeared during 2015 in Crisismagazine.com and The Wanderer and at his blog site. It discusses the seminal year 1965, when so many of our current social, cultural, and political problems and our difficulties in the Church began to take shape. It discusses the nature of the “new direction” that became evident that year, how crucial trends took shape, and how the developments (...) of that year led to others in the short or long run. (shrink)

This was one of SCSS president Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appeared in Crisismagazine.com and The Wanderer. At a time when there is increased discussion about the need for criminal justice reform, he points to several areas that must be addressed: overcriminalization, vagueness of laws, the decline of mens rea, too much readiness on the part of American police to arrest, excessive incarceration, and prosecutorial abuse.

This was one of SCSS President Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appear monthly in Crisis and The Wanderer. In it, he summarizes his conclusions about the conformity of current American conservatism with Catholic social teaching—as put forth in the papal social encyclicals—on the subject of economics and social welfare policy from his 2017 book, Catholicism and American Political Ideologies. His analysis is based on the 2012 Republican party platform, which was held to (...) be a particularly conservative document—and thus a good measure of current conservative thinking on public policy questions. He concludes that American conservative thinking about economics and social welfare policy conforms reasonably well—certainly not perfectly—with Catholic social teaching. (shrink)

This was one of SCSS President Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appear monthly in Crisis and The Wanderer. It argues that a correct reading of the Vatican II document Nostra Aetate, while stressing interreligious understanding and noting certain common beliefs, in no way precludes a reasonable critique of Islam or criticism of its background and tenets from a Catholic standpoint.

This article was one of SCSS President Stephen M. Krason’s online “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns. It appeared on May 1, 2012. There is a link to Krason’s monthly column at the SCSS website. Since August 2012, his column also appears at Crisismagazine.com. This article considers weaknesses in present-day conservatism, and how embracing certain principles of Catholic social teaching could rectify those weaknesses.

This was one of SCSS President Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns in The Wanderer in 2021. In it, he explains the need to in an organized manner oppose the left and how, in a general way, it needs to be done. This article is reprinted with permission.

This was one of SCSS President Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appear monthly in Crisis and The Wanderer. In it, he discusses how the current oppressive actions directed against those who oppose or dissent on religious grounds to various aspects of the sexual revolution—such as the agenda of the homosexualist movement—are in line with the oppressive actions directed against those who opposed blatant sexual immorality by politically powerful figures at earlier historical times, (...) such as King Henry VIII in England. Effectively, sexual immorality has at times in history paved the way for political tyranny and reshaped nations. (shrink)

This was one of SCSS President Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appear monthly in Crisis and The Wanderer. It discusses the tragic case of Charlie Gard, the baby who a U.K. hospital would not discharge so his parents could take him to the U.S. for experimental treatment for a rare, normally terminal DNA disorder that might have saved his life. Krason says that the case illustrated a number of dangerous current trends in (...) Western political societies: the advancement of the euthanasia/“quality of life” mindset, the suppression of parental rights by both child protective-type agencies and courts that are overly-deferential to them, runaway judicial power generally, the increasing authoritarianism of functional experts, and the unwillingness of elected political officials and leaders to come to the aid of the citizenry by standing up to them and the unelected bureaucrats and judges who protect them and more generally to uphold the traditional legal norms and principles that they are violating. (shrink)

This was one of SCSS President Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appear monthly in Crisis and The Wanderer. It discusses the solid social science research that shows the harms to children raised in same-sex households. He says that in spite of this the child protective system, which seems to regard such things as spanking and free-range parenting as child abuse/neglect apparently does not view the harms of same-sex parenting to be worthy of (...) investigating. Krason suggests that this is because of the ideological biases that characterize the CPS. (shrink)

This was one of SCSS President Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appeared during 2015 in Crisismagazine.com and The Wanderer and at his blog site. It discusses the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 2015 decision on same-sex “marriage,” Obergefell v. Hodges, and its likely implications for religious liberty, true marriage, and children. He says it is the latest expression of concocted rights under the Court’s “substantive-due-process” doctrine. He suggests ways to respond to the decision (...) politically and legally—by citizens, organizations, and the use of executive power by a sound president in the near future, and by the Church. (shrink)

This was one of SCSS President Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appeared during 2015 in Crisismagazine.com and The Wanderer and at his blog site. He makes an assessment, in light of Catholic social teaching, of the race issue in America today. He argues that the typical commentary about it ignores obvious realities, is often driven by ideology and the opportunism of self-appointed racial spokesmen, and ignores serious, deep-seated problems in minority communities with (...) tragic consequences. (shrink)

This was one of SCSS President Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns in The Wanderer in 2021. In it, he writes that the Democratic party has increasingly embraced the agenda of the left, been tolerant of violence by radical organizations, been willing to compromise the principle of the rule of law, and shown increasing intolerance of opposing perspectives and a tendency to political repression. This article is reprinted with permission.

Stephen Davies taught philosophy at the University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand. His research specialty is the philosophy of art. He is a former President of the American Society for Aesthetics. His books include Definitions of Art (Cornell UP, 1991), Musical Meaning and Expression (Cornell UP, 1994), Musical Works and Performances (Clarendon, 2001), Themes in the Philosophy of Music (OUP, 2003), Philosophical Perspectives on Art (OUP, 2007), Musical Understandings and Other Essays on the Philosophy of Music (OUP, 2011), (...) The Artful Species: Aesthetics, Art, and Evolution (OUP, 2012), The Philosophy of Art (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016 second ed.), and Adornment: What Self-decorations Tells Us about Who We Are, (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). (shrink)

This article was one of SCSS President Stephen M. Krason’s online “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns. It appeared on April 1, 2012. There is a link to Krason’s monthly column at the SCSS website. Since August 2012, his column also appears at Crisismagazine.com. This article considers new, serious threats to free speech in the contemporary Western world.

This article, which inaugurated SCSS president Stephen M. Krason’s monthly online column, “Neither Left Nor Right but Catholic”, takes note of an important address given by Archbishop Charles Chaput in Europe in which he foresees increasing repression by an arch-secularist political and cultural elite against Catholics and the Church when they try to bring the Church’s message to society. This represents a deeply disturbing narrowing of the meaning of religious liberty to mere freedom of worship.

This was one of SCSS President Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appeared during 2014 in Crisismagazine.com and The Wanderer and at his blog site. He argues that, despite the criticism of President Obama’s seemingly excessive exercise of executive power to further an ideologically leftist secularist agenda, the strong and maybe unprecedented use of presidential power after him may be the most certain way to try to restore weakened American constitutional principles and (...) traditional liberties and to begin to reverse our serious cultural decay. (shrink)

This article is one of SCSS President Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” online columns. It makes the argument, in accord with such principles of Catholic social teaching as subsidiarity, that government should undertake tasks in a political society only when truly necessary. It points to many problems that experience has shown in the U.S. tend to develop when functions are turned over to government, especially in domestic areas. He made a presentation based on this (...) column as part of a panel on “What the Role of Government in Contemporary America Should Be, in Light of Historical Experience and Catholic Social Teaching” at the 2011 SCSS National Meeting-Conference. (shrink)

This was one of SCSS President, Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appear monthly at his blog site and in Crisismagazine.com and The Wanderer. This column tells families and others proposing the “Benedict Option”—i.e., trying to separate as much from the secular culture as possible and trying to build up small Catholic subcultures where their children can be effectively reared in the Faith and family integrity preserved—to be attentive of the threat posed by (...) the current child protective system and the need to seek to reform it. (shrink)

This was one of SCSS President Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns in The Wanderer in 2021. In it, he says that in spite of the left’s irresponsible claims about “systemic racism” in America, motivated by their ideological objectives, they pay little attention to the real problems in the Black community such as illegitimacy, family breakdown, and fatherlessness. This article is reprinted with permission.

This was one of SCSS President, Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appear monthly at his blog site and in Crisismagazine.com and The Wanderer. This column speaks about what might be called a new expression of literalism and fundamentalism, especially among liberal Catholics and some in Church leadership, to take certain Scriptural passages and Church teachings and apply them to current situations and public questions without regard to the context of the situations or (...) full attention to nuances or even to the facts present—to in a certain sense absolutize the contingent. Sometimes this is done to promote certain policy agendas and without even considering the full statement of the Church’s teaching, as it is expressed in the social encyclicals and other documents. (shrink)

This article is one of SCSS President Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” online columns. It briefly addresses, in light of Catholic social teaching, the immigration question that has been a major public issue in the U.S.

This article is one of SCSS President Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right but Catholic” online columns. It looks at the “Occupy Wall Street” protests, and aims primarily at drawing a comparison between them and the protests of the 1960s. It also assesses them in light of Catholic social teaching.

This was one of SCSS President Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appeared during 2014 in Crisismagazine.com and The Wanderer and at his blog site. He argues that the common strain running through such political developments as the rise of Islamism, modern political ideologies, and contemporary leftism is the fact that, one way or the other, they represent man trying to make himself God. To paraphrase Irving Babbitt and others, as the notion of (...) God goes, so goes philosophy, and society and culture, and politics, and economics—the religious outlook is at the core of all other perspectives. (shrink)

This was one of SCSS President Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appeared during 2014 in Crisismagazine.com and The Wanderer and at his blog site. It discusses how Catholic social teaching does not mandate particular public policies and must not be confused with a point of the teaching itself. It emphasizes that there can typically be many different policy approaches that can be used to make sure that moral demands are met.

This was one of SCSS President, Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appear monthly at his blog site and in Crisismagazine.com and The Wanderer. This column discusses the problems of guaranteeing free higher education at state universities and colleges that was especially promoted by Senator Bernie Sanders in his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, and which is likely to continue as a political issue in the years ahead.

This was one of SCSS president and Franciscan University of Steubenville professor Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left Nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appeared initially in Crisismagazine.com on May 1, 2013. It argues why the U.S. criminal justice system is in a state of crisis. It argues that what seem to be ideologically-oriented critiques of the problems of the system actually have their basis in traditional Christian thinking.

This was one of SCSS president and Franciscan University of Steubenville professor Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left Nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appeared initially in Crisismagazine.com on February 3, 2013. It discusses the ongoing assault by secularist groups to cleanse American public life of any vestiges of religion. This radical separationism, which had its roots in the post-Civil War period and essentially was embraced by the U.S. Supreme Court in its long line of establishment clause decisions, is (...) completely contrary to the thinking of the Founding Fathers and the predominant culture of earlier America. Krason calls for a renewed effort, at different levels, to reclaim America’s historically religious and Christian culture. (shrink)

Reviews : Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity ; Steven Seidman and David G. Wagner, Postmodernism and Social Theory ; Stephen Crook, Jan Pakulski and Malcolm Wa ters, Postmodernization: Change in Advanced Society ; Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity—Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-modern Culture.

A brief critique of President Trump's decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement.

Several years ago, in a brilliant contribution to the Collection Archives Series, Michel de Certeau wove together a large number of seventeenth-century documents pertaining to the famous episode of demonic possession among the Ursuline nuns of Loudun.1 One of the principal ways in which de Certeau organized his disparate complex materials into a compelling narrative was by viewing the extraordinary events as a kind of theater. There are good grounds for doing so. After all, as clerical authorities came to acknowledge (...) the incidents of possession and treat them accordingly, they ceased to be isolated, private events occurring inside the convent walls and were transformed instead into public spectacles performed for a populace deeply divided between Catholics and Huguenots. Once or twice a day the nuns were taken from their needlework or tranquil meditations and led in small groups through the streets of the town to a church or chapel, where spectators had already gathered. At first these spectators were local townspeople, many of whom must have been acquainted with or even related to the nuns, but, as word of the possession spread, crowds of the curious arrived not only from the region but from all over France and from as far away as England and Scotland. The inns of the town were filled with these visitors who traveled to Loudun expecting to witness events there that were at once beyond nature and yet performed on schedule: repeatable, predictable, and—in their bizarre way—decorous.At the appointed times, beneath the expectant gaze of the crowd, the possessed women would ascend a scaffold, be loosely tied to low chairs, and begin to manifest their symptoms. From within each of the tormented bodies, a particular devil would arise and be constrained by the exorcist to identify himself. If a nun were possessed by more than one demon, the exorcist could dismiss one supernatural voice and demand that another come forth and occupy the tongue of the writhing woman. If the demon refused to cooperate in the interrogation, the presiding priest would solemnly remove the Holy Sacrament from the pyx and hold it up to the mouth of the possessed while the priests and spectators would assist by chanting the Salve Regina. This would provoke screams and violent contortions. Submitting to irresistible spiritual pressure, the devil would then be compelled to speak, confirming the Christian mysteries and the power of the Catholic church. “On stage,” writes de Certeau, “there are no longer human beings; in this sense, there is no longer anyone—only roles” . And these “roles” in turn are revealed to be the hidden truths that underlie the masks of ordinary life; more accurately, the ceremony has the power to convert ordinary life into mere masks, precisely so that these masks may be stripped away to reveal the inward drama of spiritual warfare. The demons appear at first to dominate that drama, forcing their wretched and unwilling hosts to manifest the power of darkness, but a spectacular ecclesiastical counterforce transforms the tragedy into a comedy in which the devil confesses that he has been vanquished by Jesus Christ. 1. See Michel de Certeau, La Possession de Loudun, Collection Archives Series, no. 37 ; all further references to this work, abbreviated PL, will be included in the text . On the relationship between exorcism and theater in this period, see also Henri Weber, “L’Exorcisme à la fin du seizième siècle, instrument de la Contre Réforme et spectacle baroque, » Nouvelle revue du seizième siècle 1 : 79-101. Stephen Greenblatt, the Class of 1932 Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, is a founder and editor of Representations. His most recent book, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, received the British Council Prize in the Humanities. He is presently completing a study of Shakespeare and the poetics of culture. “Marlow, Marx, and Anti-Semitism,” his previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, appeared in the Winter 1978 issue. (shrink)

This was one of SCSS president and Franciscan University of Steubenville professor Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left Nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appeared initially in Crisismagazine.com on September 17, 2013. It points to the curious similarities between what the adherents of the Albigensian heresy —which, incidentally, helped trigger the Inquisition—believed and current cultural perspectives. The parallels between the Albigensians and the current age, especially on sexual and human life questions and male-female relations, are striking.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003) 341-362 [Access article in PDF] Virgin Father and Prodigal Son Stephen Brockmann I IN BOTH THE UNITED STATES and Germany—as well as in much of the rest of the Western world—the baby-boom generation now holds a controlling position in politics, economics, and culture. The election of Bill Clinton (born in 1946) to the Presidency signaled the generational shift in the United States as (...) early as 1992, and that shift was confirmed by the election campaign of 2000, in which both candidates, Al Gore (born in 1948) and George W. Bush (born in 1946), in spite of their differences, represented the same generation. In Germany the political shift in generations did not occur until 1998, when Gerhard Schröder (born slightly before the beginning of the German baby boom, in 1944) defeated Helmut Kohl (born in 1930).Significantly, Kohl is a member of the generation of Germans born during the 1930s and reared during the years of the Third Reich but too young to have played any significant role, either negative or positive, during the Nazi era. No member of this generation born in the 1930s ever became President in the United States, where the generation of World War Two veterans dominated national politics from Eisenhower to George Herbert Walker Bush. However what in America is a "silent generation" has been, in Germany, the generation most closely identified with the success of the Federal Republic of Germany: these were the so-called Flakhelfer (antiaircraft helpers) who had been children during the war. Kohl therefore famously referred to them as having the "grace of late birth," meaning that they, unlike the war veterans, were presumably untouched by any form of collective guilt for Nazi crimes against humanity. Whereas in the United States the Presidency was transferred directly from the World War Two veterans to [End Page 341] baby boomers—and in the case of the two Bush presidencies, literally, albeit indirectly, from father to son—in Germany the transition from the World War Two veterans (particularly former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt) to the baby boomers was interrupted by a long period of domination by the in-between generation of Flakhelfer.In both countries the baby-boom generation represents a significant shift in sensibilities and encompasses the generation involved in student protest and oppositional social movements in the 1960s and 1970s. In the United States these included the anti-Vietnam War movement, the feminist and gay-rights movements, the sexual revolution, the civil-rights movement, and the ecological movement, as well as, on the extreme fringes, terrorist groupings such as the Weather Underground and a great many religious sects and cults. In Germany the baby boomers formed many parallel groups and movements, including antiwar, feminist, ecological, and gay segments, as well as a proliferation of sectarian Marxist political groupings (so-called K-Gruppen, with the "K" meaning "Kommunist"). In the United States, Bill Clinton was an antiwar protester in the 1960s and 1970s, while both Gerhard Schröder and his Green Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer (born in 1948) had participated in left-wing political movements during the same period.In both West Germany and the United States the heyday of protest movements in the 1960s and 1970s signaled a generational split, with younger people—the very generation that is now in power in the two countries—accusing their elders of Machiavellian cynicism, imperialism, patriarchy, and worse. Such accusations can be recalled by the formerly popular slogans "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" in the United States and "Unter den Talaren der Muff von tausend Jahren" ("under the academic regalia the stench of a thousand years") in Germany. The latter slogan was a reference not just to a generalized stodginess on the part of elderly German academics but to Hitler's invocation of a "Thousand-Year Reich;" German students were none-too-subtly suggesting that many of their professors had once been Nazis.The difference in these two slogans—one referring to past and the other to present sins—corresponds to a major distinction between the two baby... (shrink)

The U.S. Supreme Court has likely already decided how much, if any, of President Obama's signature Affordable Care Act it is going to strike down as unconstitutional; its holding will be published this summer. No matter what the Court decides, though, it will send state and federal legislators scrambling—either to implement the law or to deal with the consequences of its alteration. There are various decisions the Court might make, but it is still most apt either to leave the (...) ACA standing, or to selectively invalidate some of its mandate‐related provisions. In either case, there will be exchanges to design and manage, subsidies to allocate, transparency standards to design and enforce. The Court's decision will thus mark the beginning, not the end, of health reform. (shrink)

This article presents reflections on the Terri Schiavo starvation case: the public confusion about the facts of the case, the ethical and legal principles governing it, the modern philosophical trends that led to it, the failure of all three branches of government to properly address it, the authority of the Florida governor and the President to intervene to save Terri Schiavo, and how the case illustrated a gross and outrageous lack of political will.

These are hard days for globalism. A major candidate for the United States presidency ran on an anti-immigration, anti-free-trade platform and denounced such venerable international institutions as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United Nations. The European Union is under threat after the vote for Brexit; the Euro is under strain. China is denouncing and ignoring the result of an international arbitration over its claims to the South China Sea. Nationalist, xenophobic political parties are in the ascendency around the (...) world, buoyed by the fears and pains of populations for whom global trade has been no boon and to whom waves of new immigrants seem threatening both economically and socially. So it is both strange and uplifting, in this atmosphere, to encounter the ambitious and enthusiastic globalism of Lawrence Gostin's important, field-founding work, Global Health Law. Equal parts encyclopedia and manifesto, the book seeks both to provide exhaustive and up-to-date descriptions of the already-substantial body of international health law and of its implementing institutions and to chart Gostin's vision for their vigorous expansion. And that vision is nothing if not expansive. (shrink)

The managers of colleges and universities have to make decisions on a wide range of issues with regard to goals and how they may be pursued. “Managers” refers to such positions as the president, provost, vice president dean, and director of a university. This paper lays out the theoretical basis for the right answer for these decisions. It does so by setting out the fundamental function of an academic institution, linking this function to a duty, and explaining how (...) to satisfy this duty in hard cases. This article’s thesis is that university managers have a duty to shareholders alone. Shareholders are those who own the university. This duty is satisfied when managers satisfy the fundamental project shareholders assign to a university. My overall argument supports two theses: the shareholder theory is true and university managers’ duty is to satisfy the fundamental function shareholders assign to a university. The argument for the first thesis rested on the notion that a university needs a fundamental function if managers are to have a defensible criterion by which to make decisions and that the shareholder theory best accounts for that function. Along the way, the stakeholder theory were found to be inadequate. The second thesis applies the first thesis. The article then considered some objections. With regard to the shareholder theory, one objection is that the shareholder theory suggests that a manager owes duties to a university’s owner, and not its students, and this is distasteful. A second is that on the shareholder theory, a university can have as a fundamental function something like maximizing the endowment associated with the university, maximizing profits, or promoting a Christian lifestyle, rather than focusing on creating or distributing knowledge. A third is that a university manager has role-based duties. None of these objections is fatal to shareholder theory. (shrink)